How do you let go of your Ego

Filed Under Awareness, Blog, Spirituality |

“The ego that sees a thou is not the same ego that sees an it.” ~ Joseph Campbell

In this quote Joseph Campbell points to a truth genius in its simplicity, the ability to transform the ego through how you view the things, environment and people in your world. We are all on our journey with the ego, whether we are in it and unaware of it, embrace it as a matter of pride, or have taken up a context in which we wish to transcend it. For those of us who wish to transcend it the journey can at times become disheartening or overwhelming, the more you wish to step out of the ego the more you begin to see all the areas where the ego appears.

It can at times appear as if your ego is getting more prevalent even though you have chosen to follow a path to shed the ego. This is not in fact because the ego has gotten worse, but rather in your commitment to shed it you begin to see what you were not able to see before. Your eyes are open to a new view, you have adopted a new lens and in that lens the appearance of your ego can be glaring. The intention is not to have you feel a failure or set back in any way, but to give you the opportunity to see what you have never seen before and transform it. The question of how to transform it then becomes the issue; an issue that has been discussed, philosophized, pondered, and meditated upon by multiple religions and spiritual communities for centuries. Once you are aware that your ego exists and you have seen the benifits of letting go of it, how exactly do you do that?

It is in the quote that Joseph Campbell offers a solution, a way in which to view things that if embraced can provide a spiritual context for looking at everything that we encounter in our world. To view everything as a thou, rather than an it, is essentially to view everything as having a spirit. Not only that, but everything as having a spirit worthy of respect and sacred to the value and worth of the planet. It is to view everything as being connected to you in an intricate way, to be one with all that is. To embrace this view is to take on a view similar to nature, where everything has its proper place and its natural flow. A place where nothing is wrong but everything is taken to follow its own natural divine course. Where death, though it can be painful, provides access to birth, where there is not only a flow but a natural way of being and a connection to all that exists.

It is this connection, this freedom of ease, this ability to just be that is the opportunity of surrendering your ego. In this you are able to connect with your fellow man and woman, with nature, with the divine, and with all that is. Joseph Campbell does not offer something that is necessarily easy or the only way, but he does present an access to a way of seeing that can transform your entire experience of life and as he puts it “change your whole psychology”.

When you look at your world today ~ your friends, your family, the trees in your front yard, the sky above, and the stranger in line next to you ~ do you see an it or a thou? Who would you be if everything and everyone was a thou?